@13th how is £10 each way cheaper than £16? Or did you mean £10 total?
Sorry, I've been very lazy explaining my various costs. £10 each way is the whole journey from Gleneagles to Edinburgh (so £20 return total). The £16 return I keep referring to is JUST Gleneagles to Dunblane, from whence it's £19.10 return to Edinburgh, so £35.10 total.
So with the £10 advanced singles my original complaint is now irrelevant! 😂 If I want to take train from local station for the purposes of leaving car at home it only needs to cost me £20 return and suddenly the maths starts to stack up e.g. cheaper to walk and take train than it is to drive. I'd just gotten out of the habit of booking in advance for my commute as I use flexipass now. Shame I can't load flexipass with cheap advance singles but hey ho
^ while that may be the case, there are far too many foibles in ticket pricing in the UK.
I have just booked half a dozen trains long distance this autumn and the price of journeys massively varies mainly based on how busy a particular train is. I would much much rather have a 'in advance and discounted' rate and an 'less than a week or on the day' rate - and when a train is full, it is full...
DrP
"I’ve bought hundreds of tickets to Aldershot and never been, maybe I should sack off work one day and actually visit?"Don’t.
DrP
Despite agreeing with you I'll be there later to visit my favourite butcher. Luckily its a ten minute bus ride for me and I have a bus pass.
In the interests of joined up travel they closed the bus station next to the rail station and now all the buses run from stops scattered around the town.
It's all about supply and demand. It's £100-odd for me to get to London, which is a 1h50 trip, but I just recently found out it's only £35 to get to Pwllheli by train which is a 4.5hr trip through fantastic scenery. It's also a 4.5hr drive through different fantastic scenery. I'm thinking of doing a long weekend or something by train.
Ah okay that makes sense.
We get absolutely shafted here and it’s a joke
We do.
The fact that the Dutch, French and German national railways own some of our rail franchises and use the profits to subsidise their own fares is an absolute joke.
Does commuting Gleneagles to Edinburgh not involve a change at Stirling? Genuinely interested as it’s one of my local stations but i’m put off using it, especially with a bike, for anything heading east.
I m in Spain, to get people back on the trains it's free, well you pay 10 euros deposit and if you make 16 trips in 3 months you get your deposit back. Brilliant for me as I use the train for cycling trips, train up, cycle part way back, train back.
I was in uk this summer, 3 cheapo rail tickets bought, 3 refunds.
Haven’t used it personally but this site will apparently find the cheapest ticket permutation for you
Splitmyfare is great. It doesn't save anything on my commute, but it does massive savings on longer journeys. £60 saved on a return ticket to Bedfordshire this week
The fact that the Dutch, French and German national railways own some of our rail franchises and use the profits to subsidise their own fares is an absolute joke.
I think you need to get up to date with who owns what and how much they have lost in the past. Yes, lost.
Abellio Scotrail posted a £65m loss in 2021, they were glad to give it up.Others were in the same boat, and have given up their franchises. All ex BR franchises are now run and owned by the government.The only private companies running trains are the open access operators (Hull, GC, Lumo etc), the excursion market (numerous like Pathfinder, Statesman etc) and the ones run by the local government (Merseyrail, Tyne and Wear, TfL).
The vast majority of services are directed by the DfT, who have little idea about running a railway, and are only there to cut costs, of which there are many which need to be cut. Ticket Offices - why keep them open? 11% (iirc) of tickets are bought there, which, though not insignificant, is a small number, which gets smaller each year. Extra staff on the concourses are a better option IMO, and cuts fixed costs by not need to keep an underused office open. Maintenance and new buildings cost are a joke. The same companies apply each time, for any project, then double or triple their usual cost. The DfT seem to disregard such cost infaltion, when, there should be someone there who knows how much things cost, and only give tenders out to those who give value for money, not a winning lottery ticket each time they win a Contract.
Maintenance and new buildings cost are a joke. The same companies apply each time, for any project, then double or triple their usual cost.
They built a new train wash near us, worked 7 days a week, lots of nightime working and Weekend working - shipped contractors in from 100s of miles away. 95% of it was built before the live overhead lines went in and it's in sidings, so they could have just worked 9-5...
It's then sat idle for 2 years.....
Link above says some projects are 8 times more expensive than in mainland Europe. It isnt the only source with the same story.
That, and DfT/Government incompetence go some way to show why train fares are expensive.
